by Glyn Iliffe
Agamemnon shook his head.
It was no storm that killed me. I am almost too ashamed to speak of it, but if it will save you from a similar fate then I will put aside my humiliation. Odysseus, I returned safely home to my own palace, only to be murdered by my faithless wife. Clytaemnestra struck me down with an axe while I bathed.
Eperitus’s fists clenched. Iphigenia had been avenged! If any joy was possible in that sombre land, he felt it then. Clytaemnestra had made him swear to protect Agamemnon’s life so that she could make him pay for what he had done to their daughter, and just as Calchas had foreseen, she had succeeded. Then he remembered Iphigenia’s forlorn ghost, weeping for the years that had been taken from her. Was she satisfied that her murderer had met a rightful end? Did the king of Mycenae’s death lessen her suffering at all? Eperitus’s momentary elation drained away as he realised Agamemnon’s murder had solved nothing. All his presence in the Underworld had achieved was to cause Iphigenia to flee in terror from him, when she could have found a moment’s solace in the company of her true father. Better Agamemnon had lived than have him cause Iphigenia’s condemned soul more misery.
In her infamy the bitch slew Cassandra, too, Agamemnon continued. What had the poor girl done to deserve such a fate, other than allowing herself to be captured alive in the ruins of Troy? When I first took her as my wife a few men dared to tell me Clytaemnestra was a witch, but I refused to listen. Oh that I had, Odysseus! Now you should take heed of my warning. Is Penelope the woman you believed her to be? Or is she even now in the arms of another man, selling Telemachus’s inheritance because she could not wait for your return? Don’t forget she’s of the same unfaithful line as Helen and Clytaemnestra, so you can be sure she will be watching for your sail on the horizon and plotting to kill you the moment you return. Pray that if she succeeds she will at least permit you to set eyes on your son first, a privilege that was denied to me!
As Agamemnon returned to the great army whose spirits he had condemned to Hades, Eperitus searched the faces of the dead warriors for Apheidas. It struck him as strange that he should seek out the man who had caused him such misery, but he could not see his father among the gory ranks. Then he saw Antiphus, his ethereal body showing the wounds where the Cyclops’s teeth had mutilated his flesh. The archer’s empty eyes glanced at him in momentary recognition before the multitude of the dead swallowed him up again. Arceisius appeared also, his mouth red with blood and a hole in his chest where Apheidas’s sword had ended his life. Eperitus called to him, but he too was sucked back into the press of bodies. A moment later the ghost of Achilles forced his way through and stood on the empty sward before the phantom army. Paris’s black-feathered arrow protruded from his ankle and he still wore the armour Hephaistos had made for him, though it had lost its lustre and the figures on the shield no longer moved. Despite this, of all the spirits Eperitus had seen, Achilles’s was the only one that retained any of the pride it had carried in life.
Odysseus beckoned him forward and he knelt to drink the blood. His pallid outline became clearer and the carvings on his shield flickered momentarily into life, though by the time he had returned to his feet they were still again.
Odysseus, he said in a tired voice. What trick did you pull to get into this place? And why in Hades would you want to come here anyway? Hoping to cheat me of my spectral armour, just like you cheated Ajax of the real thing? He hasn’t forgotten that, even here where forgetfulness soothes the dead of all the burdens they carried in life. Many a time I’ve caught him eyeing my shield and helmet. Foolish cousin. Death should have made him realise the true worth of such things. But what have you done with them, Odysseus? Not lost them, I hope, especially after they cost what little honour remained to you?
Odysseus looked down at his feet in shame.
‘I had my reasons, Achilles. Perhaps you will think more highly of me when you learn I gave your armour to your son.’
Neoptolemus! Then you are forgiven, my friend. Twice forgiven if you will tell me about him. What sort of man is he? Is he worthy of the noble blood that runs through his veins?
‘More than worthy,’ Odysseus answered, and Achilles’s grim face brightened a little as Odysseus described Neoptolemus’s feats on the battlefield, his killing of Eurypylus and his part in the capture of Troy.
If only I could see him now. My mother warned me that if I went to Troy I would perish, even though my name would live on in glory. But I was young and foolish: I chose fame over life. If only I could be given the choice again.
‘Do not regret your death, Achilles. All die, but few are honoured among the living as you are.’
And do not dismiss death so lightly, Odysseus, the wraith replied. I would rather be a lowly farmer with the blood still in my veins than a king among the dead. Far better to feel the sweat on my brow and the strain of the plough against my muscles than to wear a ghost’s crown in the company of the woeful departed. I would surrender my place in the hearts and minds of every man in Greece for a single moment back among the living! Cling on to life, Odysseus. Dig your fingers into it and never let go, for it’s all you have.
With those words he turned and strode away, the ranks of the dead opening to receive him. For as long as Eperitus could remember, he had hankered to be a warrior like his grandfather before him, risking his life again and again for the sake of honour. Only as the war had drawn towards its bloody climax – and Astynome had opened his mind to the possibilities of life – had he begun to comprehend its futility. But Achilles had shown him that glory had no value to the dead. Glory was a banquet without food.
‘Ajax!’ Odysseus called out. ‘Come, drink the blood and speak with me.’
The great warrior now stood before the teeming dead, his arms crossed and his blank eyes staring at Odysseus. Blood still ran from the wound where, with his own sword, he had taken his life. But if Achilles had come to realise the vanity of his lust for glory, which had driven him to his death, Ajax did not seem to understand the emptiness of the pride that had pursued him to his.
‘What I did, I did with good reason,’ Odysseus told him. ‘Even so, I regret it with all my heart and all the more so because of what I did to you. You were the best of all the Greeks after Achilles’s death; you should have taken his place and led us in the battles that remained. Instead the gods robbed you of your senses and fooled you into taking your own life. So why do you cling on to your hatred for me? Isn’t there enough misery in this place without that, Ajax? Lay your burden down and let us talk like the friends we once were.’
But Ajax simply turned and pushed his way back into the crowd of spirits.
‘Haven’t you seen enough yet, Odysseus?’
Teiresias was standing on the steps that led up the pinnacle of rock. As he spoke, the dead began to drift away, leaving the meadow of black grass empty again. Odysseus stepped over the trench and crossed to the foot of the stone stairs.
‘Odysseus,’ Eperitus called after him. ‘Let’s go while we still have any will power left to us.’
‘Listen to your friend,’ Teiresias said.
But Odysseus was already climbing the steps, slowly and forcibly as if he was pushing against an invisible wall. Eperitus followed him, and after a long and wearisome climb they were at the top of the shoulder of rock, gazing down over the plain below. The falls where the Cocytus and the Phlegethon met was directly beneath them, its thick waters oozing down into the yellow Acheron. In the distance were two more rivers. One was as white as snow, which Eperitus guessed was the Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness. The other had to be the Styx, the River of Hatred, in which Achilles’s mother, Thetis, had dipped her infant son by his heel to make him invulnerable. Both fed into the Acheron some distance away, helping it on its course towards a wall of peaks that rose up from the mist. Though even his eyes could not see it, Eperitus knew that that was where the souls of the dead entered the Underworld. Hermes would shepherd them past the Furies and Cerberus, the giant, three-headed hound
, to the bank of the Acheron, where Charon would ferry them across to the Land of the Dead.
Though these horrors remained unseen, there were other spectacles in the barren planes below that were enough to fill both men with dread. Teiresias pointed his golden staff at an enormous figure lying across a distant hillside, his wrists and ankles shackled to boulders. His name, the seer told them, was Tityus, a giant who had attempted to rape Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis. Not satisfied with killing him for his crime, the twin gods had avenged their mother’s honour by ensuring he kept his physical form in Hades and devising a particular punishment for him. As Teiresias spoke, Tityus’s head was constantly looking up at the bleak sky, his eyes searching fearfully this way and that, until – with a piercing cry that forced Eperitus to cover his ears – two colossal vultures swooped down and settled either side of him. At once they plunged their hooked beaks into his flesh and began tearing at his liver.
‘I’m told the pain is exquisite,’ Teiresias added as the giant’s screams shook the rock beneath their feet.
As Eperitus’s eyes moved from the awful spectacle and passed with horror over the excruciating punishments of other men and women who had offended the gods, he caught a gleam like reflected light. Shunned by the misty hordes of the dead was a pool of clear water at the foot of a small cliff, from which hung the branches of a gnarled tree, heavy with fruit.
‘Who’s that?’ he asked, pointing at a man who stood up to his neck in the middle of the pool.
‘Tantalus,’ Odysseus answered.
Teiresias nodded sadly and then shook his head.
‘Agamemnon’s great-grandfather?’ Eperitus asked. ‘The one who –’
‘Who fed the gods a stew made from the body of his own son, Pelops,’ Teiresias said. ‘Yes, that is him. Like Tityus, the gods made sure he retained his body with all its physical needs. He stands in the only water in the whole of Hades, with the only living plant hanging just above him. His hands are shackled behind his back so that he can only take the fruit with his teeth or drink the water by lowering his mouth to it.’
‘Then why doesn’t he?’
‘Watch.’
Tantalus had remained perfectly still all the time they had been discussing him. A bronze ring was fastened about his neck and attached by a chain to a metal plate on the cliff face behind him. Then, without warning, he leapt up with his mouth open at an overhanging cluster of grapes. But before his teeth could bite into them, a sudden wind blew the branches upward out of his reach. At the same time he reached the extent of his chain and was yanked back with a shout of pain. Immediately he threw himself down at the water, only for it to drain away too rapidly for him to reach it before the chain stopped him. He hung there for a while, choking violently and crying out his anguish in a hoarse voice. Eperitus looked away.
‘And there is Sisyphus,’ Teiresias announced, indicating with the tip of his staff a narrow shoulder of rock beside the banks of the Styx. ‘He was once a king of Corinth and a man after your own heart, Odysseus, for he loved to deceive. Twice he cheated death, but when he boasted that he was cleverer than Zeus himself, that was the end of him. The Thunderer chained him to the bottom of the cliff below the peak of that rock, but he made the chain long enough for Sisyphus to climb the slope behind to the top. He also placed a round boulder at the foot of the slope that with enough force could break the chain and free him. The problem, of course, is getting enough force.’
Wearily, Eperitus stared down at the muscular figure of Sisyphus, whose bloodied shoulder was pressed against one side of the boulder. His face was screwed up with a mixture of pain and effort as he slowly edged the stone up the slope towards the peak. The path to the top had been worn smooth – ominously so – but Eperitus realised that if Sisyphus could get the huge rock to the top and send it crashing down onto the base of the chain below he would be free. Here was something as rare and strange in Hades as the water and fruit that existed to frustrate Tantalus: Sisyphus’s determination was driven by hope. And as Eperitus watched the man’s exertions, he felt hope too. He willed him on, knowing that if Sisyphus could reach the top and break the chain there was hope for anyone in that place. Slowly, the boulder came closer to the clifftop, one footfall after another until it seemed Sisyphus could go on no more. Then, when he was almost at the summit, he stopped. He had reached the point where the weight of the rock was too much for Sisyphus’s strength, but his determination was just enough to stop it from rolling back down the slope. He stayed there for a long time, unable to move, and Eperitus realised there was still a way for Sisyphus to reach the peak only a short distance away. He took hold of Odysseus’s arm.
‘We have to help him.’
A similar thought must have occurred to Odysseus, who seemed ready to take the steps back down to the meadow and find a way across the rivers to the slope where Sisyphus was locked in his struggle with the boulder. Teiresias’s voice broke their illusions.
‘Even if you could cross the deadly rivers of the Underworld and climb the slope in time to help him, do you think it would do you any good to interfere with the punishments of the gods? Look.’
As he spoke, Sisyphus’s foot slipped and he crashed to the ground. The boulder tumbled back down the slope to the plateau below in a tiny fraction of the time it had taken him to roll it up. For a moment Sisyphus pressed his face against the smooth rock and clawed at it with his hands. Then, slowly, he pulled himself back to his feet and trudged down the incline towards the waiting boulder.
‘I can’t watch any more,’ Odysseus said. ‘It’s time to go back. Come on Eperitus, Omeros is waiting.’
BOOK
FOUR
Chapter Thirty-Six
THE WAY HOME
Golden sunlight filled the glade. The warm air was thick with the scent of the myriad flowers that festooned Circe’s porch, while from the surrounding trees the clamour of birdsong fought against the lazy hum of a thousand unseen insects. Eperitus ran a nervous hand through his freshly trimmed beard, conscious of the sweat prickling in his armpits beneath the pale green tunic the nymphs had made for the occasion. He glanced over his shoulder at the faces of his shipmates seated in rows on the lawn. Most were smiling, probably enjoying his discomfort. Only Omeros seemed sombre. For a moment Eperitus thought it was lingering grief from the burial of Elpenor only that morning. But when their eyes met he recognised immediately what troubled him. Even the brightest summer’s day could not dispel the gloom of the ordeal they had suffered together. Indeed, Eperitus was afraid the shadow of Hades might never leave him, until the day his spirit returned to it forever.
He looked to his front again and stiffened himself, the same bracing of his body that he practised before a battle. At least the prelude to a battle was something he was familiar with, though. For all its horror and risk of death or dismemberment it was an environment he understood, a strictly male world in which he was confident of his abilities. This, though, this was alien to him. A wedding was complex, symbolic, feminine and spiritual; a ceremony over which the gods presided, but not the gods he knew. They were the domestic gods, the gods of life rather than death, of creation and nature rather than destruction and the force of a man’s will. Yet the power of those gods ran deep. It was unfathomable and mysterious, fuelled by emotion and mocking of intellect. But nervous though he was, Eperitus was ready to surrender himself to them.
It would be a strange marriage. Unlike some of the other weddings he had attended, this would be no union of convenience in which the parents of the bride and groom had matched their children to tie the families together, bringing them status, wealth or power. Neither was it a matter of personal expediency in which the man was securing a suitable mate to continue his line, or the woman was seeking to become the legitimate head of a man’s household. There would be no gifts to woo the bride, no parents to symbolically give a child away, and no home to which the groom would take his bride after the ceremony – and by living there with her and producing a
child make their marriage binding. Astynome had not fulfilled the custom of holding a pre-marriage feast, nor had she made sacrifices to the gods. And rather than being young strangers with no carnal knowledge of each other, she and Eperitus had been lovers and friends from almost the moment they had met. Though many husbands and wives learned to love each other over the years of their relationship, the pre-existence of love between Eperitus and Astynome made theirs a very strange union indeed.
Not that Eperitus cared if their marriage was unconventional. Everything about it – the ritual and tradition, the symbolism, the pomposity and public spectacle – meant nothing to him. All he wanted was to be bound together with Astynome in the eyes of gods and men. She would not be disregarded as his slave or concubine but be honoured as his wife, coming under his protection and being respected as the future mother of his children.
The thought made him smile. Only that morning, as she had watched Elpenor’s funeral pyre with him on the beach, they had spoken about the family they would make together. In the aftermath of death they prepared for new life. Whose looks would the child inherit? Whose temper and nature? Boy or girl, he told her he hoped it would be hers. She smiled and looked away; then she replied that the child would be a boy with his father’s dark looks and surly temperament. Only when she added he would become a great warrior like him did he stop her.
‘No, my love. If the child’s to be a boy I’d rather he took up the ploughshare than the spear. Let him be a farmer, an honest man earning his living from the land. Let him produce a bounty in crops or livestock to benefit his family and those around him, rather than become a parasite like his father, sowing the land with blood to reap a harvest of hollow glory.’
